“You can’t fight something with nothing, you have to have an alternative vision…Trump had a vision…he had an explanation. To my view, Democrats really did not”
– Bernie Sanders, in “Bernie Sanders says Democrats have lost their way”, 11/15/24, New York Times Podcast
Since our most recent disastrous election, I have seen many variations of the general plea, “We gotta do something”. The author or speaker usually has a decent analysis of how we got into this mess and understands that the working class is getting screwed – and the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to be doing much about it. Usually at the very end of the article or video comes a woeful cry into the void. For instance, at the end of an article in the New Yorker on 11/16/24, we read a quote from a pollster,
“Right now, people think Democrats have no economic plan.” As misguided as Trump’s vision for the working class may be, at least he has one, Lake noted, “and you can’t beat something with nothing.”
The New Deal and planning
I will argue that we have had a plan, for about 100 years, and it’s called the New Deal. The main lesson we should draw from the New Deal is that the Federal government can plan massive public investment in infrastructure to drastically improve the job environment for the working class as a whole. While the New Deal provided a burst of employment, we can update the idea of a New Deal by making large-scale public investment a permanent feature of a modern economy.
FDR realized that he had to show the public that democracy could work, as American democracy was being threatened by the gathering forces of fascism embodied in such individuals as Louisiana governor Huey Long, the radio preacher Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh and his “America First” campaign. In 1938, during one of his ‘fireside chats’ over radio, he explained that democracy must perform in order to survive:
“Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations–not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat. We in America know that our own democratic institutions can be preserved and made to work. But in order to preserve them we need to act together, to meet the problems of the Nation boldly, and to prove that the practical operation of democratic government is equal to the task of protecting the security of the people.
History proves that dictatorships do not grow out of strong and successful governments, but out of weak and helpless ones. If by democratic methods people get a government strong enough to protect them from fear and starvation, their democracy succeeds; but if they do not, they grow impatient. Therefore, the only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.
We are a rich Nation; we can afford to pay for security and prosperity without having to sacrifice our liberties in the bargain.”
Currently, hunger and starvation, although always a problem, is not the overwhelming crisis that it was in the 1930s. This time, throughout the US and Europe, large swaths of the population are angry at stagnating or declining incomes, accompanied recently by a painful inflation. In order to improve their economic situation, they are not concerned enough about democracy to avoid flirting with fascism whether it is Georgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, the Democrats in Sweden, the Alternative for Germany party, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands– much less Donald Trump in the US.
With all due respect to Bernie Sanders’ plan to create social democracy in the US, all of these European countries have already implemented very beneficial social democracy programs, covering health care, unemployment, parental leave, childcare, and many other programs that Americans can only dream about. In one of the great ironies of the 2024 election, the vice presidential nominee, Governor Walz of Minnesota, oversaw the implementation of such programs in his state; despite my great hopes that the Harris campaign would simply adopt a ’Minnesota Agenda’ (my name), even if they had, it may not have been enough.
It’s the working class job market, stupid
The main problem that Sanders and social democracy in general cannot solve is to significantly increase the power of the working class as a whole, by which I mostly mean the ability to tighten the job market so that the vast majority of working people can easily get a good job – that is, a job that pays well, is skilled, is long-term, provides benefits including plenty of leisure time, and takes place within a nonbigoted and healthy work environment. Only the government can create a full employment economy in the long-run, because only the government can create tens of millions of good jobs. It was just this job market tightening that the New Deal accomplished, by using the power of government to create and expand national infrastructure.
The problem now is not to find everyone a job – a problem that was not completely overcome until the government hired tens of millions to either fight World War II or produce for World War II. The problem is to create the possibility of a better future and lift the burden of a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle, which most people will risk democracy in order to escape.
Coming out of World War II, there was some momentum to write full employment into official Federal policy. In 1943, the eminent economist Michael Kalecki wrote that full employment would be bitterly opposed by the business class, because ‘The “sack” would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow’. In other words, the power of the working class as a whole would increase if there was true full employment, that is, if it was very easy to move from job to job. To echo an old country music song, people in a true full employment economy could ‘take this job and shove it’.
The vast majority of voters, in the US or elsewhere, don’t need to read Kalecki to understand what they intuitively know – if there is high demand for workers, and there aren’t too many more workers than there are good jobs, working people could enjoy better times. This is the idea that the fascists, or fascists-adjacent, also intuitively understand, and since they don’t care what economists say, they have the flexibility to propose ideas ‘outside the box’.
In this epoch, the idea of throwing out immigrants, besides appealing to lower-brain hate and anger, also can be used to argue that there will be less competition for ‘native’ workers, and therefore, theoretically, most workers will benefit. In the case of Trump, he has added another idea – tariffs, an oldie but goodie which holds forth the possibility that factories will come back to the US, and therefore some good jobs will be reinstituted, since imports will be more expensive. When Sanders says that Trump and company have an ‘explanation’, I interpret that to mean that Trump can explain the loss of working class power by blaming immigrants and imports.
What has been the response of the Democratic party and the Left in general to the problem of providing for the systemic improvement of the working class? Crickets, that’s what. This is the central reason that you will not be hearing much that is substantial about how to appeal to the working class from center-left leaders. There is ideological self-censorship at work here – because they don’t want to allow the idea of government-led economic policy to replace market-centered economic policy. This is the blind spot of center right/center left policy for the last 100 years, that fascists eventually exploit.
Public works…work
The Democratic party/Left response should be, “Let’s learn from the New Deal, and the entire history of the United States, and the entire history of civilization, and understand that when the government creates huge, national infrastructure projects through national infrastructure planning, the jobs market is tightened, the working class benefits, the national economy is improved, and the legitimacy of the democratic state is validated.“
It also is the case that our entire infrastructure needs to be rebuilt in order to avoid the worst of global warming. So let us devote a considerable percentage of our GDP, at least 10% (about 2.5 trillion dollars per year), to rebuilding the national infrastructure, wiping out unemployment and underemployment, and thereby reclaim the loyalty of the working class.
Trump is trying to show that he will help the working class by throwing out tens of millions of hard-working immigrants, and by imposing tariffs that will have the effect of spiking inflation; the progressive alternative is to create tens of millions of good, government jobs (either directly or indirectly) that help to rebuild the economy to thrive for decades to come. In addition, the manufacturing sector of the economy could be rebuilt, along with its millions of good jobs. By rebuilding infrastructure, we can rebuild manufacturing, and a strong manufacturing sector can provide the goods needed to rebuild the infrastructure. Public infrastructure building and manufacturing form a virtuous circle of broad-based economic growth, as I have explainedelsewhere. Which argument sounds better: opening up 20 million low-paying jobs that most people don’t want, by rounding up millions of people; or creating 20 million good jobs by rebuilding the country?
I hear echoes of such an approach in Michael Sandels’ suggestion, that “An economic patriotism…bringing supply chains closer to home, making public investments to manufacture key goods to support key industries domestically — that can all be articulated as a kind of rejuvenated patriotism, that is connected to the dignity of work”
Seeing is believing
But even Sandel’s conceptualization is not concrete enough, I don’t think, to sell to the American public. I think the public needs to have some idea of what the program will actually do. What will the country look likeafter a period of reconstruction has been completed? We know the public can get excited about a big set of projects, because that’s what happened when the Green New Deal briefly attracted major attention, before it was destroyed. Such a program could still be called a Green New Deal, or a what I have called a Green New Deal Plan, or it could be called something different like ‘Rebuild America’, similar to the International Association of Machinists Union campaign in the mid-80s.
We should start by pointing out that the single largest public works project ever undertaken was the Interstate Highway System. This was accomplished by the Federal government designing, managing, owning, and maintaining a huge piece of infrastructure
The John Birch Society, considered kooks at the time but now being mimicked for their views on fluoride by RFK Jr, came out against the Interstate Highway System because it was ‘socialist’. And they were right, if you consider a piece of the ‘means of production’ that is owned and operated by the government as socialist. So why was it built? First, because the only ideological world view that is stronger than the view that the government should kneel in obeisance to the holy market is, well, the holy automobile (and its attendant icon, the single family home). And so it was that even in America, the magic of the market could be overcome – with great gusto.
So let’s call a new, improved, state-of-the-art national electrical grid, an Interstate Renewable Electricity System. This would not only involve new transmission lines criss-crossing the country (ideally underground, which is much more efficient), but critically it would also involve Federal control, ownershipt and siting of the wind and solar farms that would provide all the electricity we would need, without fossil fuels. Here we see the great advantage of a government-controlled system vs. a market-based system – the various wind/solar farms could be placed at exactly the places they need to be placed so that, 24/7/365, there would always be enough wind blowing/sun shining that close to 100% of electricity would be generated (with some battery backup, just in case). The market simply can’t provide this.
In addition, an electrical Interstate could extend down to the building level. The Federal government could either directly or indirectly, through contracting, provide solar, battery and EV charging stations for buildings, that could be leased and so would cost the consumer much less money for electricity, with monthly leasing charges replacing most of the consumer’s electricity bill. In fact, the building could make money by providing electricity to the grid, when possible.
Thus, we would have an electrical system that would be more reliable, and that would cost the average person much less money for electricity. On top of this, the grid would provide millions of jobs constructing, operating, maintaining, and most importantly, manufacturing the parts for such a system. In other words, this is a public works project that would create high income jobs, tighten the job market, and increase the standard of living by lowering costs. And, oh yeah, it would go a very long way to preventing climate disaster. It would also decrease health costs because there would be no pollution from fossil fuels for electricity generation.
Another ‘Interstate’ could be an Interstate High Speed Rail System, that could be built near most of the Interstate Highway System. Again, this would provide high-quality jobs, offer low-cost intermediate to long-distance travel, and revive much manufacturing while decreasing carbon emissions. In addition, it could be constructed in such a way as to re-link smaller cities to the national economy, which have generally been overlooked by the airline industry.
We can also see some ‘feedback loops’ emerge here – the rail Interstate would use the electricity from the electricity Interstate. If the rail Interstate also had a freight component, it would drastically increase the efficiency of freight transport in the US, and thus help the rebuilding programs.
This feedback among systems would be critical to another set of public works – the rebuilding/expansion of city and town centers, by constructing tens of thousands of large, comfortable apartment buildings, along with local transit systems. Call this a ‘Walkable Center Reconstruction Program’ (make cities walkable again?). The main benefit would be to bring housing prices way down, one of the major problems creating the ground for the rise of fascism. These buildings could use the cheaper electricity provided by the Interstate, and the city/town centers could be connected by the rail Interstate.
Lest you think such a building program sounds delusional, the US government basically made suburbia possible by providing low-cost mortgage guarantees and subsidies. Ironically, Donald Trump might never have become a public figure had his father, Fred Trump, not been able to use FHA subsidies and WWII contracts to build most of his first real estate projects.
A web of possibilities
All of this construction, from electrical grids to train networks to apartment buildings, would require a massive amount of manufactured goods. Instead of providing these goods from abroad and applying tariffs, a much more direct way to create desirable employment is to require that the manufactured goods be produced domestically.
But the government could go further. During WWII, the Federal government basically built the factories and industrial equipment that was used to produce war equipment. After the war, the government sold these new factories back to the manufacturers for pennies on the dollar, which helped pave the way for the post-war economic boom. For a 21st century New Deal, the Federal government could buy (or lease) all the new equipment manufacturers would need to create the goods needed for new infrastructure. Since machinery is the largest cost for manufacturing, this would bring the cost of goods down and compete with Chinese imports, thus increasing the standard of living, while providing millions of high quality jobs.
In addition, if the government required all new factory equipment to be nonpolluting, including not emitting greenhouse gases, and mandated the creation of products that could be recycled and/or reused, health on a national level would benefit, climate change would be slowed, mining would be minimized, and consumers could get some money back after they finished using their products.
There are other public works systems that could be created. An Interstate High-Speed Internet System would be much faster and more reliable than our current system; a reworking of our agricultural system to be more local, organic, and regenerative would yield healthier bodies and healthier ecosystems; new water systems could be created, partly to adapt to more flooding and droughts from climate change
An advantage of a set of interlocking public works systems is that other aspects of a progressive agenda, like free medical care and education, could be seen as a logical extension of the main rebuilding program, instead of existing as programmatic islands. In the case of health, the combination of more walkable neighborhoods, healthier food, the virtual elimination of pollution, and even the decrease in stress around jobs, would probably decrease the national health ‘bill’ to a point that Medicare for All would be much cheaper than it would be now. The need for a highly-skilled workforce would make free college, trade schools, and even child care a necessity in order to create the needed levels of skill. Instead of being caught in dead-end, precarious, low-wage jobs, millions of non-college educated voters (and many college-educated ones as well) could look forward to better careers – and to voting for progressives.
This entire panoply of programs would be possible only with national planning, not of the entire economy, but by adding an additional 10% to 15% to the GDP. The benefits for the working class that would ‘emerge’ out of this system of systems would be immense: a situation where virtually anyone who wanted a good job could find one, and a job market that was so tight that employers would offer plenty of leisure time and construct less stressful work environments.
Part of the reason planning would be necessary would be to prevent the emergence of inflation. As we saw in the post-pandemic recovery, a chaotic market system, even with massive fiscal government inputs, can lead to inflation because the government has no control over the economy except in the form of clumsy, scattershot actions such as sending everyone money or increasing the interest rate. With control over parts of the energy, transportation, housing, manufacturing and agricultural sectors, the government could ensure that costs do not spike.
Another reason this program would not be inflationary is that it is an investment. That is, the economy will receive greater returns than without the investment. In other words, eventually the pressure for inflation would decrease from where it is now, because the productive capacity of the economy as a whole would increase, and planning could smooth out short-term distortions.
Since these are investments, the government could simply create much of the money needed to pay for all of these programs. ‘How are you going to pay for it’ is always the leading edge of conservative attacks on progressive ideas. But banks create money all the time – for instance, for mortgages – so why not let the government create money?
The other two ways to ‘pay for it’ would be to use a large portion of the military budget, and to raise taxes on the wealthiest. The military-industrial complex is a horrible waste of money but is very strong politically because it distributes money throughout the economy. A rebuilding program could also benefit every part of the country, except that it would actually create useful outputs.
Of course, corporations and the very rich do not like to pay taxes and have the power to keep it that way. Many progressives, such as Bernie Sanders and Robert Reich, decry the worsening inequality of our society and advocate for higher taxes on the ‘millionaires and billionaires’. However, such arguments might have more political potential if the higher taxes on the rich were shown to lead to a positive program that would materially help the majority of the population.
All together now
In general, political success of many of the agendas of the Left can only be realized if they are linked to a larger, economic agenda, because people generally prioritize their economic concerns, as they did in the current election. For instance, climate change will never be at the top of people’s minds unless a climate change solution is part of a broader economic solution.
Similarly, African-Americans have historically been in much better shape collectively when the job market has been tightest. That is why during the Great Migration millions of African-Americans migrated from the South to the North – the industrial businesses need for workers overcame their racist desire to hire only whites. A full employment economy lays the groundwork for the elimination of poverty. If everyone can get a job, it will be easier to provide a good income to the few who cannot work.
Another marketing advantage of this kind of set of programs is that there is no need to ban anything, or talk about ‘degrowth’. A rebuilding program need not prevent anybody from doing something. These systems would offer new and better goods and services in the market, and if people prefer the government’s goods and services to those provided by private firms, well, that’s the ‘magic of the market’.
It would be easier to sell this ‘rebuild America’ program or ‘Green New Deal’ than the ‘deport all immigrants’ and ‘raise high tariffs’ that MAGA is pushing. The fascist, or fascist-adjacent, program is always able to stoke feelings of victimhood, blaming the targeted ‘Other’, whether that ‘Other’ is immigrants, liberals, people of color, Jews — it depends on the historical period and circumstances. We know that the New Deal prevented the worst of these fascist tendencies from succeeding in the US; the pride of national renewal, with a very concrete set of projects to do it, could overwhelm the backward-looking ‘make America great again’ jumble of ideas. Trump is proposing to create 20 million low level jobs by throwing 20 million people out of the country; rebuilding the US can create 20 million good, permanent jobs that would guarantee a prosperous future.
The Democrats, and progressives in general, have been trying to use the idea of moving forward, without explaining what we are moving forward to. Building a world-class productive set of public works systems could fulfill this goal. It is the ‘something’ that ‘we gotta do’.
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